Algae eating tankmate for bichir

This is a discussion on Algae eating tankmate for bichir within the Beginner Freshwater Aquarium forums, part of the Freshwater Fish and Aquariums category; -->
Hi so im having a hard time finding an algae eating tank mate for my senegal bichir. He seems to want to eat everything ...

Hi so im having a hard time finding an algae eating tank mate for my senegal bichir. He seems to want to eat everything in there. It's a planted tank so the algae eater cant eat em. Also i dont want em to be too big, as i know the bichir gets pretty big himself. Any suggestions would be appreciated :)

Bushnose catfish ( Ancistrus sp. ) is a GREAT algae eater. It only grows about 3-5 inches at most, and is VERY good at eating algae. Along with this, it is quite peaceful, and will not touch your plants, so long as it has enough food, but it is able to eat brush and beard algae off the leaves of plants WITHOUT damaging them. There are only a few things needed, though. The catfish needs its own cave, and it absolutely has to have driftwood. This catfish needs to chew on the driftwood in order to stay healthy. Along with algae wafers or chips, try to feed it fresh vegetables, too. Also, for some reason, they love french cut beans. Anyways, this should solve your problem. Remember to thank me if you found this helpful!

Just as a word of caution, Bichirs are well known for eating absolutely any fish they can fit into their mouths. When your Bichir (if he isn't already) becomes larger there is a large chance that he will eat those plecos. Now, there have been instances where predatory fish have been introduced to potential prey fish when the predator is much younger/smaller, and when it grows to a size that would originally instigated to hunt the prey fish, a predatory fish will occasionally ignore the prey fish because their prolonged presence with the predatory fish. It's risky, but your Bichir and plecos could exists together peacefully. If your Bichir is already large (nearing a foot), I wouldn't be surprise if plecos become Bichir chow. Good luck. o.o